The bat is hot. And what that means is that it is going to hit someone, hard. It means that while the establishment press smuggly thinks that they have "dealt with" the Dean thing, the same way McCain was largely irrelevant after Bush trashed him - they are dead wrong.
There is a political explosion coming, and 2004, like all just before the storm moments, features an establishment pulling out the stops to make things come out the "right" way. It usually doesn't work for long.
Let me put aside the issue of what happened in January, and point out the obvious problem with Dean's attempt at the Presidency in 2004. Dean ran as Andrew Jackson - the head of a populist wave. This puts him as the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time: because the leader of a populist wave must have a tide of supporters behind him to fill the congress and remake the institutional structure in his image. Failure to do this will lead to a backlash, and fall from power.
McCain had no such wave behind him, and so when McCain himself was decapitated, the anger he tapped vanished.
Dean, however, gathered more support for his project to change the Democratic Party, and continues to raise money. Dean has a meaning that he did not before: he is running to create an interest group within the Democratic Party. While much of the anger at how Dean fell is poorly expressed, there is, at its core, a truth: what happened was unfair. Not unfair in the slender way that life is unfair, but a clear exercise of media fiat.
And that is why Dean's fall becomes, in a sense, the next example of what happened in 2000 being no accident: that there is, fundamentally, a conflict of interest between the people, and the institutions of the media that rule over them. That anger has now grown to the point were it will be focused, simply because economic injury has been added to electoral insult. The media does not understand that in 2000 there were many people who were uneasy, but few had lost their jobs, their retirement savings and their future. Few people had had their savings depleted surviving long term unemployment, or taken a job that paid half what they had before. While McCain's support ebbed away - Dean's will not - even if Dean is no longer the leader of it at some point.
The political explosion that is coming took a giant step forward, because of the crassness of what happened. Kerry could not survive - nor has he gotten - the scrutiny that Dean recieved. I have seen a number of "angry Kerry" pictures. Dean got Gored - and while he walked into the ambush, and even invited it, that does not excuse what was done.
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So where is this going? It depends. It depends on whether the movement opens up, or closes down. If it becomes a cult of personality around Dean, then it will fail, regardless of how much money it raises. If, on the other hand, it turns the corner, and becomes the movement which is targetted at ripping the veto of the Fourth Estate from the hands of people who have demonstrated that they have a clear agenda based on naked self-interest - then it will gather force over time - because then anyone who feels they have been robbed of their just reward by the mass media will find themselves at home. Clark supporters, people who lost money in the stock market, people still upset about 2000 - will be joined by people who have lost jobs, or who realize that Bush's promises have always been empty.
The revolutionary moment is a delicate one - there is always the temptation to turn inward, rather than outward. Those movements that turn inward become marginal, those that turn outward grow.
The choice is in the hands of the people who belong to it.